This Month in Google Ads

[00:00:00] It is Tuesday and time for our weekly deep dive. Google has announced that headlines can now serve as site links. And that has some interesting implications for the future of ads. As usual, our Google Ads correspondent Jill Saskengales is here to break it all down for us. Jill worked at Google for six years. She's now host of the Inside Google Ads course and podcast and a highly sought after Google Ads coach. She joins me from her office in Toronto. Hello. Hello, hello.

[00:00:30] So headlines, I think we all know what a headline is. Can you remind us what a site link is in a Google ad? Yes, site links are additional links that can show with your ad. So you'll have your headline, the big blue link, the description, that black text. And then optionally below it, you might have site links. And these could be just blue links. They could be blue links with additional black text below them. Google tests a lot of different formats.

[00:00:56] So, you know, organically, we can have site links as well. But with Google Ads, you can, until now, pick exactly which URLs you would like to show as site links and what you want the headlines or optional descriptions of the site links to say. And we used to call these extensions, did we not? Yes, site links are a kind of extension. Extensions are now called assets, which is not helpful because asset means a bunch of other things. It sure does.

[00:01:19] There's about a dozen different kinds of these assets, formerly known as extensions. Site links are one of them. Call outs, call extensions, promotion extensions, image extensions are all other kinds as well. Gotcha. All right. So what's happening? What's the change here? So what happened now that Google made quite a big hoopla about is that your headlines can now serve as site links.

[00:01:40] So basically, when you create a responsive search ad in Google Ads, you can provide up to 15 different headlines and up to three of those headlines could serve at a time. So one headline could be Today in Digital Marketing, dash. Another headline could be Marketing Podcast and Newsletter, dash. Another one could be Hosted by Todd Maffin. And when responsive search ads first came out a couple years ago, you would often see three headlines serving at a time.

[00:02:07] But starting about last year, we started to see only two headlines or maybe just one headline serve at a time. Last year, Google made it so some of your headlines could actually show at the beginning of your descriptions instead. And so this seems to take that a step further when now some of your headlines that are not being used as headlines could show in a site link spot instead. So your headline could say Today in Digital Marketing, Marketing Podcast and Newsletter. And maybe now a site link would say Hosted by Todd Maffin.

[00:02:37] And if someone clicks on it, it would take them to the same landing page as if they had clicked on your headline. How does it decide which one to show? Is it is it just kind of doing like, well, today it looks like the market is favoring this or is it like unique to every individual based on their past engagement, past offsite visits and so on? It's supposed to be the second one unique to each user. And that's the whole reason responsive search ads were created rather than showing everyone the exact same ad.

[00:03:06] Give Google the flexibility. That's a word we see Google using a lot now. Asset flexibility to show the right message to the right user at the right time. And it's supposed to show whatever combination it thinks will perform best. But that's something that's very amorphous, hard to pin down. I actually was on a call with a Google Ads product manager who manages responsive search ads before this change was announced. And I asked the product manager about that.

[00:03:32] And they like couldn't exactly confirm what they mean by best and how exactly things get chosen. Is it the one with the best click through rate? Is it the one with the best conversion rate? Couldn't confirm because this person didn't know or couldn't confirm because they know and they don't want to give that away? Oh, the impression I got. I can't say what another person knew or didn't know. Right.

[00:03:53] The impression I got was that it just wasn't something that they considered to be important. And again, this is the impression I got. I'm not saying that. But like, you know, Google is going to tell us which is the best. And as a former Googler, I can very much see that mentality. It's like, yeah, we'll show the best performing. Well, what does best performing mean? I don't know. The one that's going to perform best. OK, but like, what does that mean? Yeah. Don't worry about it. It's just the one that's going to perform best.

[00:04:23] Like the questions seem to surprise them. And so I was not the only person on this call. There were others in the industry on this call. And we were all kind of pressing and didn't quite get a definitive answer there, unfortunately. Which is not specific to Google. I mean, you know, Meta has the black box. Everyone has sort of the black box. And in fact, we're moving into an era where trust the AI is becoming. Well, we won't get into my old man shouts at clouds theory on that.

[00:04:51] It all kind of sounds like a bit of a nothing burger. Am I wrong here? Like, is this going to have an impact on advertisers? The site links change? Yeah, it was interesting to me, of course. Predictably, some people are outraged. I don't see how you can get outraged about this. Of all the changes happening, this did feel very nothing burger. But I noted that, like, I was invited to hear about this and meet with the product manager and ask questions. So why? Why was this such a big deal? And whenever I see stuff like this that Google thinks is a big deal, it's because Google thinks this is going to be a big moneymaker.

[00:05:21] Again, my opinion. Like, why else would they make a big deal about this? And so the reading between the lines to me, you know, last year we saw headlines could serve at the beginning of descriptions. Now headlines can serve at site links. In the announcement where Google shared this news, they used the term asset flexibility seven times in the blog post. And so I think that is the bigger news here. You know, we don't quite know yet how ads are going to play into AI overviews. I don't even think Google knows yet.

[00:05:47] We don't know how ads are going to play into Gemini and all these different placements. And what does a keyword mean in a world where a prompt was 500 words long, you know? And so by making all these assets more flexible and disambiguating it from this must be headline, this must be site link, it just gives a lot more room for Google to run these different experiments and play with different ways ads will appear. And so that to me is the exciting, like unspoken news here. Of course, change is coming. Change is always coming.

[00:06:16] But my opinion on this news is that it's a signal of a lot more different kinds of ad formats and ad placements coming. And so in order for advertisers to leverage those, we need this kind of asset flexibility. So this is just the beginning. Much more coming to this space, in my opinion. Between juggling client meetings and keeping up with what's changed in the marketing world, who has time to stress about website security? But security is important.

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[00:07:41] It's not like picking it up off a website or is it? I guess there are some of these assets or site links where it kind of does do that, doesn't it? It can do that unless you turn it off. So when you look at your assets report in Google Ads and you look at your site links, there's a column called source and it could be advertiser or it could be automatically created. And maybe in the future there will be other sources as well, like AI created. Who knows?

[00:08:05] So if you have not turned automatically created assets off, then yes, Google could create site links for you. But otherwise, you must create them yourself. But it's something to be aware of. There's actually a coaching client I worked with who is like a home service provider and was getting a ton of people filling out his form looking for jobs. And then we checked and it turned out Google had automatically created a site link for him, even though we didn't even have a careers page.

[00:08:31] But I guess somewhere in the logic, it was like, oh, careers, click here. And so that wouldn't say click here, but careers and people clicked on it and filled it out looking for jobs. So we had to nix the automatically created site link. Yeah, I was going to ask if that is like how accurate they are. I mean, is it something you recommend people turn off or generally speaking, does it perform better even if there's a couple of misses? I'll come back to my usual answer. It's like AI is an average maker.

[00:08:57] So if you are not good at writing your own assets, if you don't have site links at all, then having this turned on is going to kind of bring you up to the average and help you out. But if you're someone who is actually spending some time, even if that's spending time with AI, writing headlines, writing site links, picking which parts of your website you want to be site links and which parts are not, then this probably won't make a big difference to you. All right, Jill, thank you. Thanks, Todd. Jill Sassingales is our Google Ads correspondent.

[00:09:24] You can learn more about her Google Ads training program at our affiliate link at todayindigital.com slash GA. Jill is here every month on the Tuesday show. And you can watch our full unedited interview. There's a link to it in today's newsletter, which you can sign up to for free by tapping the link in the show notes or going to todayindigital.com slash newsletter. I'm Todd Maffin. Thank you for listening. See you Friday for the wrap up of the week's developments in digital marketing.